


Aftermath - 6 Weeks Out

by serendipityxxi



Series: The Void [11]
Category: Haven (TV)
Genre: F/M, M/M, Multi, Rebuilding, Reggie the Kelpie, Reggie the Murder Horse, The Grey Gull
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-11
Updated: 2019-03-11
Packaged: 2019-11-15 10:40:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,996
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18071876
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/serendipityxxi/pseuds/serendipityxxi
Summary: Duke gets some good news about The Gull and makes some decisions.





	Aftermath - 6 Weeks Out

Duke Crocker is good with his hands.

He likes fixing things. He likes knowing he can take a misfiring engine, or a silent radio, a wobbly table or a broken chair and make it whole again. Some of it he’s learnt by force; there wasn’t a lot of money in his childhood,and out at sea or in some of the more remote places he’s lived and worked, if a thing broke you couldn’t just go buy another to replace it. Some of it he’s learnt because he was charming a person who was interested. Some of it he’s learnt because he was interested. Still, the idea that he can take a thing and make it whole, make it work, make it beautiful again, it settles him, calms him, makes him feel like he’s worth a little bit more.

Curing the Troubles feels a little bit like fixing an out of tune engine. It makes him feel useful, like he’s making amends for the harm he caused when all those Troubles exploded out of him.  But it’s not something he can do for sixteen hours every day. His hands can change a tire or hammer a nail without any input from his brain. Curing the Troubles isn’t like that at all. It requires him to be on his best game, he needs all his wits about him, all his focus.

Duke is good at compartmentalizing. He’s good at looking at only the problem at hand. But even Duke has days when he can’t quite manage that. Some days, the shadow of his own Trouble rears up, some days Duke just… doesn’t have the brain power to help someone sort through the tangled mess of their emotions. Some days happen after nights when there are nightmares to deal with at three a.m. - his own or Audrey and Nathan’s- that leave him emotionally wrung out. You can’t pour from an empty cup. Duke knows he isn’t Audrey Parker with her Trouble magic, who can dredge up just a little more from the very depths of her being when it’s needed.

So some days Duke leaves the station early, or doesn’t go in at all. He takes his phone and his toolkit and he finds a worksite.

He makes sure to check in during the day. They’re all too anxious to go very long without some kind of communication from each other.  He sends Audrey pictures of what he’s built. He texts Nathan bits of local gossip he hears. Hammering and sawing and mixing concrete’s good, solid work, work he doesn’t need his brain for. His hands move automatically from task to task and Duke doesn’t feel like he’s letting down the town. He doesn’t feel like he’s not pulling his weight. Some days _this_ is how he can help. Some days this is the _only_ way he can help.

He helps Otis fix up The Rust Bucket, he helps Russell fix up the tattoo parlor. They’re not the most respected people in Haven but they deserve help just the same. It feels like old times, honestly, manning a sledgehammer and joking with people about Haven being a “drinking town with a sailing problem.” It’s not a joke he’d make with Dwight’s people, not a joke he’d make with the cops who have sort of come to see him as one of Nathan’s people, if not one of their own. It’s a familiar joke though, for a part of himself Duke hasn’t given up. He’s good at fitting in wherever he is, but these people, the folk who aren’t the cream of the crop, who are a little odd, the squeaky wheels, these were his people for a long time.

They’re still his people, no matter who he’s sleeping with.

He helps Little Mike fix up his pawn shop in between cures at the station and the excitement of getting the Trouble hotline up and running. He spent three days refereeing Nathan and Audrey on that fight when Nathan proposed the hotline. Nathan was right though, they couldn’t spend the day running around putting out Troubled fires (literally and metaphorically) and cure people at the same time. Audrey handpicked the people for the helpline personally, but still spends more of her off hours volunteering there than Nathan or Duke would like.

Duke finds himself working with Dwight on the hospital reconstruction one evening. They hammer in silence in the deepening twilight and Duke’s surprised how comfortable the silence is. He’s not sure when, but he and Dwight have apparently moved into the realm of friends. It’s...nice, Duke supposes. Dwight’s good company when he’s not throwing manhole covers at a person. He’s proven surprisingly helpful, too; when Duke doesn’t have a contact for something, Dwight does and vice versa. They’ve probably had a hand in half the construction projects going on in Haven in the two months since the shroud went down.

Duke isn’t surprised to see Dwight’s name pop up on his caller ID two weeks later. He is surprised at the location Dwight asks him to meet him at.

Duke’s been to the ruin of the Gull twice since the shroud came down. Once to toast the old girl with Audrey and Nathan. He and Nathan got drunk in the back of the Bronco and Audrey had to drive them home, cursing about how tall the damn truck was the whole time. The other time, he was driving past on the way home from a job site and couldn’t resist stopping. He’d prowled the remains restlessly in the dark, and then gone back to the job and sawed things in the headlights of his truck til his chest had hurt less.

The Rouge had been his home- regardless of where he’d gone he’d always had the Rouge- but the Gull… The Gull had been his second chance here in Haven, his second shot at belonging.

He parks in the same spot in the lot he always used to and can’t bring himself to get out of the truck, his heart pounding so hard in his chest it feels like it’s trying to escape. He doesn’t want to be here, either. He gets his first good look at the old building in the pearly-white early morning light. The Kraken hasn’t been spotted since before the shroud went down. None of the other coastal towns have reported enormous-octopus-sized damage either. They can only hope that means that they’ve cured the person whose Trouble created it in in the first place. The damage it’s left behind though…

Half the roof of Audrey’s apartment is caved in, like a giant toddler had a tantrum and stomped on it with his giant toddler foot. The side railing of the porch up there is still hanging by luck or some thread, listing drunkenly over the edge. The stairs are gone, the glass in all the windows shattered. The patio he designed himself is--  Duke stops cataloguing then, both because it makes it hard for him to breathe and because Dwight steps out from the piles of rubble on the other side of the parking lot.

Duke slides out of his truck and goes to meet him halfway. Dwight probably wants him to agree to demolish the place entirely, Duke realizes with a sick twist in his gut. It’s gotta be a public hazard the way it is.

“Dwight.” He can’t come up with a snazzier greeting, doesn’t bother with one. He wants to get straight to business.

“Duke.” Dwight nods, turning to face the Gull again.

It hurts, seeing her in the light of day, but Duke turns too.

“She’s torn up pretty bad,” Dwight begins. The sympathy in his voice makes Duke want to punch something.

“If you need me to have her bulldozed for the sake of public safety or whatever just tell me.”

“Sure, you could do that,” Dwight agrees placidly and Duke’s hands ball into fists all on their own. The blood pounding in his temples almost makes him miss the rest of what Dwight’s saying. “-but she’s still structurally sound if you wanted to consider rebuilding instead.”

“What?” Duke feels exactly like the wind’s not only been snatched out of his sails but his sails have been replaced with cheesecloth.

“Had one of my guys give her a look through yesterday,” Dwight explains, tucking his hands in the front pockets of his jeans, apparently satisfied Duke isn’t going to deck him anymore. Duke hadn’t even realized he’d seen his clenched fists. “Says the bones are still sound. If you wanted to go to the expense of reconstruction. Wouldn’t be cheap-” Dwight shoots him a look out of the corner of his eye that definitely says _don’t tell me you can't afford it_ “-but if you wanted to rebuild her you could. My guy says you could be up and running by September.”

All the breath whooshes out of Duke’s body on a long exhale, leaving him empty and a little wobbly. He had never planned on opening a restaurant. To be fair, he had enough squirrelled away in hideyholes here, there and everywhere that he could probably retire and live out the rest of his life in relative comfort. Especially if his investments continue to pay off the way they have. Duke doesn’t have to do anything with the rest of his life that he doesn’t want to do.

The question is: what does he want to do?

Right now there’s the Troubles to be cured, the town to be rebuilt, but there’s got to be life beyond that. What does Duke want that life to look like? It feels daring to even think it, of life beyond this moment, of life without crisis after crisis. Duke thinks of the last time he left Haven. He’d fully intended on a solitary life, working in a garage somewhere, fixing things instead of breaking them

Isn’t that what he’s doing here, though? Fixing things instead of breaking them? Audrey and Nathan keep insisting they want him here. They want him in their lives. They want to share their lives with him. He keeps waiting for them to sober up, waiting for them to realize how he complicates things.

But then Nathan went and bought that bed…

They _want_ him.

And even if they didn’t? Duke’s got a life here. He’s got people beyond Audrey and Nathan - he’s got Gloria, and Bill and Meg, and even little Mike and Dwight. Is he going to want to give that up in three months? Six months? A year? He cannot imagine waking up in six months and not wanting Nathan and Audrey. He can’t imagine waking up in six years and not wanting Nathan and Audrey. He’ll take them for as long as he can have them, and as for the rest...

Does he want the Gull back? It’ll mean choosing to put down roots.

This isn’t fate handing him a chance, here.

This is him making his own fate.

“Yeah,” he tells Dwight, throat thick emotions. “Yeah. I’d like that.”

Dwight smiles and claps him on the shoulder approvingly.

\----

Audrey and Nathan take off work the weekend before they break ground on the Gull. Duke watches Audrey squint up at the sun like she doesn’t quite recall what it does, and resolves to get her out of the station as soon as he finds a spare hour this week. He’ll make a fake call into the Troubled hotline if he has to.

The crew Duke hired is coming in from out of town- he’s paying them well enough to make the two hour drive. They’ve heard rumours about Haven, heard on the news about the blizzard that took out half the town. They’re not going to see anything to make them think Haven deserves half the weird stories they hear (at least, not on that first day, they won’t).

On that first day, they meet a site that is so well squared away they have a hard time comprehending what happened to the building they’re here to fix.

What they _don’t_ see is the crew that pitched in the Saturday and Sunday before to salvage what they could of the old Gull. A more motley crew would have been hard to find- the chief of police himself working side by side with criminals and local housewives and members of the local gang called The Guard to get the Gull ready to be repaired.

Duke sees them, though.

He sees Audrey and Nathan sifting through rubble. He sees Bill and Meg running wheelbarrows of broken pieces to the trash pile. Bill’s smile is so full of hope when he meets Duke’s eyes that Duke can’t do anything but smile back. He sees Aiden, Jack and TJ rough housing, flinging smashed bricks. Dwight hauls old boards like they weigh nothing.

Tracey and her kids, Nora and some of the other staff come out. Duke absolutely doesn’t tear up when Nora first punches and then hugs him hello. It’s good to see her. He hasn’t seen her since he left. He hadn’t thought of how he was leaving her in the lurch until he was outside the fog wall and couldn’t get his calls to the restaurant to go through. The look in her eye as she takes in the carnage tells him she understands a little of how he feels.

More people than Duke even realized he knew show up.

Regulars from the Gull turn out to help, people whose Troubles he cured, people he and Dwight helped to hide when the Troubled were being hunted. Even Kevin from the Guard comes out with a bunch of his buddies- Duke remembers them from the pizza party, remembers a couple of them from during the warp. Kevin’s buddies almost come to blows with Jack, or Jack almost comes to blows with them- whatever the case, everybody backs down when Gloria starts yelling.

Even Vince shows up. Not to help. No, he’s writing a piece for the Herald. He looks…old. Old and worn. Duke doesn’t throw him out. He lets him, and the kid he’s found to follow him around like a puppy, have free rein of the site.

If the work crew had seen the clean up crew that weekend, they’d have realized all of Haven’s weird stories were true. The Troubles are no longer a secret among the locals and it’s way too early in the season for the tourists to be out and about as winter still has its grip on the town. The work crew might have seen a tall, gangly teenage girl walking across the parking lot followed by a beam of wood at least twice her size, the beam bobbing along like it was floating on a stream with nothing but air beneath it. They might have seen an old woman stamp her foot, and seen the earth shake beneath it, levelling out smooth as you please. They might have seen three men walking around in their undershirts despite the snow on the ground, and seen the snow melt in a steaming hiss when one of them came too near it.

Cally Tyrol and her husband turn up for a few hours. Cally troubles all the salvageable small appliances they find in the rubble into working again, including Audrey’s old radio and one of Duke’s favorite lamps. The base is made of metal and shaped like a monkey. Nathan hates it. Duke’s going to put it in the bedroom once he buys a new shade.

The work crew shows up on Monday, though, and they miss all the wonders.

But Duke sees them.

He sees it all. He sees people using their Troubles without fear, he sees people laughing, he sees a town rebuilding.

\-----

It’s late on Sunday, the sunset casting orange and purple shadows over the world, when Duke stands at the edge of the mostly clear parking lot and stares out over the bay he knows like the back of his hand and sees something strange in the water. It looks like a horse, the head of a horse poking out of the water but the eyes, the eyes are glowing orange.

He takes a step towards the water but the slam of a car door distracts him. He glances back to see Audrey and Nathan finished loading up the back of the Tramp. They’re heading towards him. When he looks back there’s nothing in the water. Must’ve been a trick of the light and shadows? Driftwood in the water catching the setting sun somehow?

Nathan’s hand lands on Duke’s shoulder, warm and steady even through his winter coat. Audrey slips her arm around his waist and holds on. Duke slings his arm around Nathan’s shoulders, drops a kiss on Audrey’s hair, the fuzzy hood of her jacket catching in his stubble.

“Thanks,” he tells them. He means it in a hundred, a thousand different ways but for once his silver tongue has failed him. He doesn’t have the words. He hopes they can hear them anyway.

“Hey, Duke,” Bill calls.

They all three turn and Bill brandishes his camera at them. “We need a before picture,” Bill tells them.

Duke laughs and takes a step toward the Gull but Bill shakes his head. “No, no, no, we need a before picture so you’ll remember what it was like to sleep the night through before this construction project started,” Bill jokes, waving Duke back into place between Nathan and Audrey.

His camera goes off. It catches Audrey’s grin, and Nathan’s weird fake smile with no teeth that he’s been doing in pictures since like the third grade, and Duke with his mouth open like maybe he’s about to smile, maybe he’s about to make a remark. It’s not a perfect picture, but Duke’s going to frame it and put it behind the bar when the Gull re-opens. He’s going to caption it “New Beginnings.”

 

"New Beginnings."

**Author's Note:**

> Got a fav bit? line? scene? I'd love to hear about it. :)


End file.
